I am pissed off. I was trying to burn a cd today with cdrecord and it kept on failing saying shmget failed. Many other apps said the same thing. So later I got curious and searched for "shmget failed linux." An article by telsa came up saying that GNOME apps take up 6 segments each and that many people only have 128 segments available. She continues saying that one must edit /usr/include/asm/shmparam.h and set _SHM_ID_BITS to a higher number and recompile kernel. I think this is really messed up that I must recompile my kernel for GNOME to behave. So, I edited my .xinitrc not to run gnome-session and I was able to burn my CD with no problem! I'm probably going to be flamed for this, but what the hell is up with that? aaronl has a point that GNOME apps take too much memory. I'm probably just going to be using GNOME panel from now on since that is the only reason I ever used GNOME anyway. Maybe later I'll move off of that too. It seems GNOME's approach is to change the universe (recompile kernel) to solve a problem instead of changing itself (use less ram). bah.
Oh yeah, the article is at http://www.linux.org.uk/~telsa/GDP/gnome-faq/problems.html